Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Last night I read that legendary programmer Michael Dann had passed at the age of 94. I hope that longevity is in the scheduling gene.

There is not a very large fraternity (and sadly yes it is overwhelmingly a male dominated gig) of schedulers in the history of Broadcasting. Schedulers tend to keep their jobs across several regimes. I have had more than one new Network Entertainment President come into my office and say a variation of "I don't know what the fuck you really do but you seem to know what you're doing and I have bigger problems so carry on". On one or two occasions a new President has approached me and said "I know a thing or two about scheduling". They generally get fired pretty fast. But I digress.

Mike Dann and I shared a few things about our careers. We both had long runs at two networks. We appreciated how scheduling could turn mediocre shows into hits. We both celebrated and tried to protect and build quality shows. Most importantly, neither of us looked down on mass appeal, silly, "low brow" television. For him is was the Paul Henning shows: "Petticoat Junction", "Beverly Hillbillies", "Green Acres". For me it was reality television and my friendships with Bruce Nash and Mike Darnell.

You see what Michael Dann and I shared in common was that we were both ratings junkies. In his obituary in today's New York Times this quote of his stood out.

“By and large I operated under a principle I was trained in, and that
was that there was no such thing as a good program executive with
low-rated shows or a bad program executive with high-rated shows, and I
never changed my position as long as I was working in the commercial
networks.”

I shared this principle through my entire career as well. That often put me at odds with several of my colleagues but I really didn't care. My job was to get ratings and if I could get them with "quality" fine but if I needed to go into the gutter once in awhile so be it.

So in honor of Mike Dann I will share with you one of the lowest moments of my professional career. This is from my late lamented original Blog. It's the tale of how I came up with the idea for a reality show called "MY BIG FAT OBNOXIOUS RABBI"

Don't judge me.

There has been some discussion of late about how CBS
will be able to do another iteration of UNDERCOVER BOSS now that the show is
having some success. Won't it be difficult to replicate the secrecy and won't
workers know something is up especially if the presence of cameras is explained
in the same way each week?Since I
believe that reality TV is the pro wrestling of the new millennium I assume
that UB is more staged now than we may think and that's ok. FOX was faced with
a somewhat similar dilemma several years ago when we were stunned by the
ratings success of JOE MILLIONAIRE. Mike Darnell tried to convince our leaders
to make a second one before we aired the first iteration. Mike hoped that if JM
popped we would have a second one in the can and therefore avoid the problems
of replicating the surprise element. I think NBC shot two iterations of FOR
LOVE OR MONEY for that very reason. All this got me thinking about the need for
secrecy in the world of unscripted and one of the lowest moments of my
professional career when I threw all principles aside in pursuit of a rating.

A little while after the success of our series MY
BIG FAT OBNOXIOUS FIANCE' (a woman introduces a fat obnoxious guy to her family
and tells them that they are about to be married) the Masked Wife and I
received a letter from the Rabbi of our temple informing the congregation that
he was about to retire. I had actually become buds with him. We would often
have sushi and shoot the breeze. He was and is a really nice guy who now wanted
to be known as "Alan" and not "Rabbi". A
few weeks after we received the letter the Masked Wife informed me that she had
been asked to join the search committee to find a new Rabbi. My mind
immediately went to the dark side. What if Mikey (Darnell) and I went to the
board of our temple and offered them a sum of money that would clear all their
debts and in return the temple would allow us to find an actor to play the most
obnoxious Rabbi ever. He would be introduced to the congregation and we would
film his first few weeks as the new Rabbi. The committee can continue to find
the replacement; we just want to do the con first. I even figured out the
camera thing. We would say that the temple had agreed to allow the search to be
filmed for a documentary on how a reform synagogue selects a Rabbi.

This all made perfect sense to me. I could not
contain my enthusiasm as I pitched all this to my sweet wife. She just looked
at me and said "You realize if I agree to let you go to the board we would
have to leave the temple and possibly the area". I think my response was
"Possibly but this is going to be huge". She said, "Go
ahead". My wife assumed that I would eventually come to my senses. She
called my bluff. That's what these jobs can do to you.

So I pitched “My Big Fat Obnoxious Rabbi” to Darnell
who, not surprisingly, shared my enthusiasm. We played around with the idea for
a while but eventually we realized that we would burn in hell if we did this.
Mike and I still think of it as the big one that got away. Anyway, the temple
finds a Rabbi and one Sunday afternoon the entire congregation assembles to
meet him. After some speeches the curtains open to reveal the new Rabbi and his
family. I turned to the Masked Wife and said, "That's a 40 share down the
drain".

A few weeks after the new Rabbi was introduced I'm
having a farewell lunch with Alan our now former Rabbi. I decide, what the
fuck, let me share this crazy idea with him. I walk him through all the
details; he sits there quietly for a minute...."How much money would you
have offered us?”. So I give him a number, a number that would have cleared the
books on the temple’s debt. "How could you afford to do that?".... I
explain how production works. "Why didn't you come to me with
this?".....................OH SHIT!!!!

So respect and praises to Mike Dann and maybe this story makes it into my obit.

So this year
the networks are acting like broadcast networks and casting their cable
envy aside. This is gonna drive certain people bonkers.

Over the course of the next two days I found myself in two "conversations" on Twitter about both the relevance of the Upfronts and the level of creativity and quality in what was being peddled by the networks.

The first discussion was with Tim Goodman, Television Critic for the Hollywood Reporter and professional Bitcher and Moaner. Tim is that guy who, for decades you see standing on a street corner with a crazed look on his face carrying a sign saying "The End Is Near". He has coined the two TCA

annual events the "Death March With Cocktails" and each year mocks the Upfronts claiming both the networks and advertisers are in denial regarding the reality of Broadcast Television. It's only 8-9 billion dollars about to change hands. Tim also believes he could do the job of a Network President (or whatever the title de jour is) better than the incumbents but then questions why anyone would want such a well compensated job. Our exchange ended with the following tweet on my part.

@BastardMachine If you guys ran networks you would be rocking in a corner sucking your thumb crying "Mommy" within a week. Trust me.

There are several TV writers who think they can do the job of a Network Executive and believe me they can't. These are high pressure jobs and most criticism of the people in them comes out of ignorance and a lack of understanding about why and how decisions are made. By the way, I like Tim. We actually have the same taste in TV shows and he will be bitching and moaning about upfronts and TCAs for many many many many more years to come. Broadcast television isn't going away all that quickly and the networks are much more savvy about the future than Tim and others might think.

@nprmonkeysee I just gave a lot of people their lead. CBS is vindicated in all this. They have always embraced who they are.

Later that day Diane Gordon a TV writer and a really nice person inadvertently incurred my wrath when she lamented the quality of the CBS comedies starring Kevin James and Matt LeBlanc. More so than the other networks CBS knows their audience and those Monday multi-cam comedies with established sit-com stars should rake in the gelt for the network.

I really try not to get into these twitter food fights but I was just fed up with a certain segment of the TV intelligentsia who can't seem to evaluate the Upfronts and the shows presented for what they are. It's all about the advertising and selling time in these shows.

I feel the broadcast networks all did the smart thing this year which was to provide their Sales groups with what they needed to bring in as much money as possible in what appears to be a robust marketplace. You do it with stable schedules. Lots of returning series and new series that are pre-sold. So we saw TV versions of movies and reimaginings of television franchises. We saw a bit more of an emphasis on episodic procedurals and sci-fi that was all looking to the past rather than to a dystopian future. CBS remains committed to mult-cam comedies (although they finally had success with a single cam last season). FOX continues to do well FOX comedies. NBC returned to its comedy roots on Thursday. The CW remains committed to the one hour comedy format and the ghost of Paul Lee was walking through the halls of ABC greenlighting its comedies. Oh and a little less unscripted.

A few weeks ago on Silicon Valley (my favorite comedy) Stephen Tobolowsky's character has the funniest line of the season. He is trying to explain to the heroes of the show why it is more profitable for his sales group to sell a box rather than compression software which could be game changing. "You know how you keep the best salespeople? Give them something easy to sell." BINGO!!!!!

There are those who will bemoan these schedules and, yes, a lot of this stuff will turn to shit real fast, but all the networks will bring in the gelt and then figure things out. The networks got their swagger back this May and kudos to them for choosing commerce over art and, by the way, there may be some gems or at the very least some solid broad appeal shows among this group. I saw a few where I said to myself "Now that's a TV show".

In this era of alleged "Peak TV" everyone can find the programming that will satisfy their needs. Someone needs to explain to me why it all has to have the seal of approval of the cultural elite. We should all like what we like, respect other people's tastes and not shame people for trying to make a buck. Let's have fun and celebrate TV!!!!!

Monday, May 9, 2016

In my thirty-five year career in broadcast television the
question that I am most often asked has to do with exactly what goes on in the
scheduling room. Over the years, there have been several television writers who
have called me up during pilot week imploring me to let them spend an hour in
the room so that they can experience for themselves what it is like to set a
network schedule. I have walked into scheduling rooms with several young
executives who were about to experience the process for the first time and you
could see the mix of excitement and fear on their faces. Last May was my
twenty-sixth and final year in a scheduling room, over a quarter of a century,
and for over twenty of those years I “ran” the room first at NBC and then at
FOX. Let me take you inside the scheduling room..

As I mentioned in a prior post, I came out for my first NBC pilot
screenings in 1989. Brandon Tartikoff was in charge and, although he invited me
to come out to Burbank for the pilot screenings, I was not allowed into the
scheduling room until the very end when Brandon went over the final schedule.
The room was populated primarily with men and it was almost a religious
experience to sit in the back of the room while Brandon, as only he could, went
through the rationale for the schedule. Brandon would often stop to remind an
executive about phone calls that needed to be made or points he wanted someone
to remember for his epic upfront presentation in New York. Little did I know
that in January 1991, on a totally miserable day in NYC, I would receive a call
from Warren Littlefield asking me to come out to Burbank to be his head of
scheduling. He was going to trust me with the keys to the bus.

But let’s go back a year. I came out to Burbank for my
second pilot screening and this time Brandon Tartikoff let me into the room and
he even allowed me to put up a schedule. Brandon and I had connected over the
years. When I was in research we played “dueling schedulers” with
our Saturday Morning kids lineup. Brandon would go to the Sat AM scheduling
board and put up his schedule and then I would put up mine and we would go at
it for a while. He was using SMURFS, SNORKS, ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS, PUNKY
BREWSTER and MR. T to test my mettle as a scheduler. In Brandon’s book “The
Last Great Ride” he recounts how I would walk my dog on Sunday night (in those
days the three nets aired movies and specials head-to-head on that night) and
look into neighbor's windows to determine what network the family was watching. Brandon
would call Monday morning and I would download him on what I had seen. So by
the time Brandon let me into the scheduling room he knew I was a sick fuck and
addicted to the scheduling game.

I sat in the back of the room taking it all in. NBC was
in its downward spiral with THE COSBY SHOW starting to decline in ratings. It
was clear Brandon had no idea what the schedule should be. We used magnetic
cards (believe it or not we were still using them at FOX when I left) and Brandon
was just moving them around the schedule with no real strategy. In the end he
changed 11 ½ hours (more than half) of the schedule.

At some point Brandon looked at me sitting in the back of
the room just trying to be invisible and hoping he wouldn’t throw me out of the
room. Brandon told me to go put up
a schedule. Of course, like others, I had put together a schedule and I went up
to the board. I honestly don’t remember much about what I put up but I do
remember two “moves”. I put SEINFELD on the schedule on Sunday at 8. I honestly
don’t remember what I paired it up with. The second move was to put SISTERS in
the Saturday 10PM slot (this is back in the days when we actually scheduled
twenty-two hours). Neither show was on Brandon’s schedule. Both shows were
removed from the board before I had sat back down. I did have some
vindication.SEINFELD was on
the fall 1991 schedule (my first year as head of scheduling) and SISTERS came
on mid-season and spent five years in the Saturday 10PM time period.

What I do remember about my first trip to the scheduling
board was how comfortable I felt being up there and how I could walk through
the schedule and give a rationale (code: for bullshitting my way through) and
it almost made sense. I had passed my second trial by fire and, a year later,
it was my board…. well sort of. In May 1991 I had not officially been announced
as head of scheduling so Lee Curlin, Brandon’s scheduler (Brandon was over at
Paramount by then) was officially in charge of the grids. After we had screened
the pilots and it was my time to put up a schedule I put SEINFELD in the
Thursday 9:30 time period behind CHEERS. Lee quickly took it down and returned
WINGS (an under-appreciated comedy but no SEINFELD) back behind CHEERS where it
remained. I’ll save the story of why for another day. SEINFELD did get on the
schedule but on Wednesday night Where
it led out of NIGHT COURT. That July I was officially made head of scheduling
and for the next twenty-two years, at NBC and then at FOX, it was my board. I always felt that I had three children: my daughter, my son and the schedule and I was protective of all three.

So what exactly goes on in the scheduling room? First of
all, there is no scheduling room. At NBC the scheduling board was in the
executive conference room. One year the conference room was renovated and the
board was positioned such that when executives would enter the room from a side
door they would smash into a panel used to close the board. It was hilarious
and often broke the tension in the room. At FOX, for most of the time that I
was head of scheduling, the board was in Peter Chernin’s conference room. One
year I developed an electronic board that was built to replace the magnetic
scheduling board. One problem, the screen was too heavy for the wall in Chernin’s
office so I had to spend one year in the room taking shit for spending thirty
thousand dollars on a board that would take down the wall. We stuck with the
magnets after that.

As pilot week progressed we would keep getting down to a
smaller and smaller group until we finally had the people who would be in the
scheduling room. Here is where I’m going to piss off some people who may be
reading this. If it were up to me, here’s whom I needed in the room:

·The President (Chairman) of Entertainment

·The top one or two Network Sales executives

·Our Head of Business Affairs

·Our one or two top Finance executives

·The head of Research

·Our one or two top marketing executives

·The big boys (in my tenure they were all boys).
At NBC Don Ohlmeyer and Bob Wright. At FOX Rupert, James and Lachlan Murdoch,
Peter Rice and Peter Chernin.

Notice who’s not on the list: the creative executives. By
the time we get down to a small group they should have had the opportunity to
pitch their favorite pilots to this senior group of executives but once it’s
schedule setting time I always tried to get them out of the room. To be honest
I was not always successful in doing that. I had nothing against them and
appreciated how hard they had worked in delivering the pilots but at some point,
for me, the room had to be populated with those who did not let a personal
agenda dictate their decisions. We were now down to the business of setting a
schedule. We were down to ratings, costs and revenue. Needless to say this
attitude did not win me many friends.

Since, most years, the room was populated with more people
than were needed I mastered the art of “going away” where, after putting up the
schedule, I would get into some sort of Zen state where my body was in the room
but my mind and spirit were somewhere else. I would generally play all of “Pet
Sounds” in my head while these discussions were taking place around me. It was
the only way I could keep my sanity as others ripped the tiles apart figuring
there had to be a better schedule. I always had faith that, at some point, common
sense would prevail. I also knew that most people didn’t have the guts to own a
schedule and take responsibility for the final decision. I am the first to
admit that I could be a real dick in that room.

By the time we got into the scheduling room I had a pretty
good idea as to where we would wind up with the schedule. For a few months I
had spent lots of time talking with the various constituencies, screened the
pilots and listened to the research. Throughout my scheduling career I would
tell everyone that the best schedule was the sales schedule. Entertainment had
spent the prior ten or eleven months developing, marketing, managing and
scheduling the product but, as soon as we returned from NYC after the upfront
presentations, the ball was in Sales’ court, They had to go out there and
monetize this shit and I felt we needed to make it as easy as possible for them
to do that. Ironically, on this week’s “Silicon Valley” a tech COO says, “You
know how you keep the best sales people? Give them something easy to sell.”
It’s something of an indictment but there is an element of truth to it.

At NBC I had a great relationship with the two top Sales
executives at the time Larry Hoffner and Mike Mandelker. Mike and Larry would
come out to Burbank for pilot week. The three of us would go out to dinner on the
night before we started the scheduling meetings. I would hand them the grid
with my schedule, we would go over the rationale and I would make sure that
they were on board. The next day they were the first people I called upon to go
up to the scheduling board. There was a lot of trust among the three of us. Larry
would play the Vanna White role and Mike would do his best to articulate why
this was the schedule that Sales wanted. During the good years we would discuss
for a while but generally within a day or two we would walk out pretty much
where we started. Every year at some point we would talk ourselves out and Don
Ohlmeyer would ask, “OK so who do I fire when this doesn’t work?” Mike and I
would raise our hands and we would be done…. our version of white smoke.

Some years weren’t quite that easy. When Jerry told us that
he would not do another year of Seinfeld we needed to figure out what would
replace the show in the Thursday 9PM time slot. In the mid-90’s that was
considered the primo slot on Network television. I still remember the Festivus call
from Warren Littlefield after he had met with Jerry. “Well we’re going to win
the May sweep”. That was Warren’s way of telling me Seinfeld would not be on
next year’s schedule. Warren, Don Ohlmeyer and I all immediately came to the
same conclusion, which was to move Friends up to 9PM. Unfortunately, by the
time we got to the scheduling room in May things got muddled as too many voices
joined the conversation. Instead of moving the young skewing Friends to 9PM we
moved Frasier back to Thursday night from Tuesday. By that time Frasier had established a
Tuesday night for us. Moving it back to Thursday led to all sorts of
complications over the next few seasons.

There was the year we cancelled one of our movie nights,
which resulted in WWIII in the scheduling room and created rifts within our
already dysfunctional group. That was the beginning of the end for the group
that put together the Must-See-TV era at NBC. It was so ugly and vicious that I
came home after I thought the schedule was set (with the Monday Movie still on)
and told my wife that I’m pretty sure I will be fired when we return from New
York. To Warren Littlefield’s credit, we went back in the room the following
morning and turned some people around on the move.

I remember the year we moved Mad About You to the 8PM
Thursday time slot because the comedy we thought would fill the slot turned out
to be a dud. Up until that point the 8-9 hour was considered the family hour
and putting a show like Mad in that time slot caused a bit of a controversy. I
was suddenly Public Enemy #1 among some pro-family organizations.

NBC back in the 90’s was an East Coast/West Coast
organization with the East being Business/Sports and News while the West was
Entertainment. Every year the EC execs would come out thinking we were a bunch
of clueless airheads and each year we sent them back with their tails between
their legs. One exec in particular tried to run the room every year only to be
put in his place.

At FOX the scheduling room was, for me, a lot more fun.
Peter Chernin really seemed to enjoy the whole process and, although we would
generally wind up pretty close to where we started, Peter liked to turn over every
stone. We also spent a lot of time doing anything but discussing the schedule.
We were just having a blast. One of my favorite moments ever in a scheduling
room was when my buddy Mike Darnell brought in a Russian Roulette-like gizmo
where a few of us would put our finger in a slot and one person would get a
shock. Mike, Rupert Murdoch and I spent an hour playing with this. Yeah that
sums up what goes on behind closed doors in a scheduling room.

At FOX I was sort of the caterer in the scheduling room which
meant that all the leftover candy and goodies from the screenings was brought
up to the conference room and we were all on a sugar high for two or three
days. I remember once losing track of how many Oreo cookies I had eaten (over
twenty). I was standing at the board while some conversation was going on and I
had to grab onto it as I found myself passing out. You could literally smell
the sugar halfway down the hall from Chernin’s office.

I had developed a lot of tricks to get us to what I felt was
the best schedule. I mastered the art of taking the contrary position to what I
believed was in our best interest and get others to make my case for me. One
year a certain top executive at NBC was so blindly opposed to some moves I
wanted to make that, when I put up what he wanted, he went to the board and put
up my schedule. I was sitting next to my pal Rick Lacher from Finance. He
looked at me and whispered, “Wait isn’t that….” I hushed him. Early in my tenure at FOX we were scheduling
through the weekend and, even though it was Mother’s Day, we returned to the
office for one final meeting. My boss Gail Berman was not happy with where some
things were left on Saturday and asked me to figure out how to get others to
change their position. While I stopped for gas I had an epiphany as to how I
was going to do it. I was so excited I drove away with the gas pump still connected
to my car. Four hundred dollars later I was on my way to FOX to use some
contrarian arguing.

Having Rupert Murdoch in the scheduling room was always fun. Out
of respect I will keep most of those stories in the vault but I’ll share this
one. Arrested Development was a show we all loved but was never really embraced
by the audience. We all felt it had a shot at an Emmy (for what that’s worth)
and, in spite of the ratings, we all wanted Arrested to return for another
season (yeah heartless soulless network executives). Mr. Murdoch was not a fan.
I had called Mitch Hurwitz at some point during the season and asked him if he
could deliver all the Arrested episodes so that I could finish the season in
early April. He asked why and I told him with total honesty that I did not want
the show on in May when we were setting the schedule. I did not want certain
people to be looking at low ratings for the show while we were trying to renew
Arrested Development for another season. Anyway when we finished scheduling
Arrested was on the schedule Sunday at 9:30 and Rupert was coming into the room
to see what we had done. Before he arrived Peter Chernin turned to me and said,
“Why don’t you walk Rupert through the schedule, he likes you”. I knew exactly
what Peter was doing and, since we started discussing the schedule with Monday,
Arrested would be the last show we discussed. I will leave it up to your
imagination as to what happened when I said to Rupert “…and at 9:30…”

At FOX, Peter Chernin had his version of Don Ohlmeyer’s
question about who to fire. At some point towards the end of scheduling Peter
would say some variation of “So when all this fails what do we do?” That’s when
I knew he felt we had exhausted all our scheduling options.

Back in the day networks would try to guard their schedules
until the morning of the upfront. It was done to make the presentation more of
an event and it also served the purpose of preventing the other networks from
using the information to perhaps make some changes to their schedule. At both
NBC, and for a good chunk of my time at FOX, I would encourage my bosses to
position us as the first network to announce their schedule. I had several
reasons for this. I didn’t want us to spend a lot of time in the scheduling
room trying to outthink the competitive schedules. I had a mantra “Let the
other guys do the dirty work for you”. Generally when you react to another
network’s schedule you wind up hurting yourself more than you better your
position. The best example of that was when Ted Harbert, in reaction to our
move of Frasier over to Tuesday to face Roseanne, flipped Roseanne's time period with Home Improvement. Ted hoped that we would blink and move Frasier back to Thursday....we didn't. He did serious damage to his comedies and his overall schedule by reacting to our move and we established a competitive Tuesday night comedy block. By going first we got in the minds of
the other guys and, if needed, we could react to their reactions but we rarely
did.

Another reason for going first was to put less time between
setting the schedule and the presentation. This decreased the potential for the
schedule to get leaked to the press and, trust me; TV writers were obsessed
with trying to scoop each other with scheduling tidbits. I don’t know how many
times I would get an email with a
bogus schedule hoping that I would react and spill the beans.

One year at NBC I decided to have some fun with this and,
after we nailed things down, I put a fake schedule on the board. My long time
assistant Kathy Farrell had the key to the scheduling board. Brian Lowry, who I
think was on his first run at Variety, called me while I was on my way to the
airport. Brian was one of a select few writers who I felt comfortable talking
to. Brian was looking for scheduling dirt. I gave him the bogus schedule. He
didn’t believe I would do that so I told him that if he didn’t believe me to go
over to the offices in Burbank and I would tell Kathy (who was in on the joke)
to open the board (which had the bogus schedule on it). I was so impressed with
myself until I saw Pat Schultz, our head of press and publicity, on the plane
and told her what I did. Let’s just say she was not pleased and was desperately
trying to connect with Brian to undo the prank.

Although the television landscape and platforms are evolving
you would never know it in the scheduling room. All that goes away and the top
executives at all the networks will still discuss lead-ins, timeslots and
competitive matchups. That’s the way it was the first time I was in a scheduling
room and that’s how it was last May for my final time in the room. It’s sort of
endearing. I wish the schedulers smooth sailing in the next few weeks and make
sure you have a copy of “Pet Sounds” on your iPhone.

Monday, May 2, 2016

The most dreaded part of the pilot process, especially for
the creative executives, is sitting down with the Network research team and
hearing the results of the testing of the shows that the creatives have devoted
their time and efforts towards over the past half year. This is the moment when
the voice of the viewers, represented by the research execs, is heard for the
first time in the process. It’s often not very pretty. I have sat in several
rooms where, following the test results, we all looked at each other and
realized that we didn’t have the goods to put together a schedule and we needed
to scramble. I have seen development executives updating their resumes in their
mind while we go over the research.

Now don’t get me wrong. A lot of poor testing pilots get on
the schedule every season either because we need to fill all the slots or
because of a rejection of the testing. Here’s what I know to be true: A pilot
that is rejected in testing will never succeed but a high testing pilot is no
guarantee of success. We get a lot of false positives; we rarely get a false
negative. The art of using testing is to look at all those shows that deliver
an average test and determine if there is something in the data that indicates
there may be a television show here. It is also important to understand why a
pilot did not test as well as expected and then to determine if those issues
can be addressed in series or are those issues at the essence of the show.

One of my favorite examples is “Mad About You”, a show that
came along early in my scheduling career and ran for seven seasons despite
having a below average test. We all loved the pilot but the testing was a
disappointment. This was 1992, twenty-five years ago. The world and what was on
television was different than it is today. Some of you may remember that Mad
was about newlyweds Paul and Jamie Buchman. In the pilot the couple was wondering whether the spark went out of their marriage. The pilot ended with
Paul and Jamie having sex on their kitchen counter while their family was in
the next room of their small apartment.

That final scene put away the pilot in the eyes of the
respondents to the pilot test. We really needed this show since we hadweak comedy development that year. What
was clear from the testing was that the idea of a show about a recently married
couple was appealing and the respondents liked the two leads. They just didn’t
like them having sex on their kitchen counter. Problem solved. By the way “Mad
About You was originally titled “Loved By You”. The pilot featured the James
Taylor rather than the Marvin Gaye version because…. well you know. Anyway,
when “Loved By You” didn’t clear I suggested, “That’s My Shiksa”. It was
rejected.

The point of this is that there is an art to reading pilot
test results and often the only thing that programming execs hear is whether it was a strong test or a weak test.

Strong testing pilots fail for several reasons. I have all
sorts of theories as to why. The most obvious is the amount of money put on the
screen for a pilot. The cost of the pilot far exceeds the budget of an episode.
You often get a different director after the pilot so you have a different
vision. I don’t know how many times I looked at someone in the screening room
and said, “You’re never going to see that again.” A pilot can test well for
several reasons but those reasons are sometimes not articulated to the
producers by the creative executives and, by episode two, the show is off on a
path that was not reflected by the testing.

I have always believed that the genre with the largest
number of false positives is Sci-Fi/Fantasy. As a group these shows test above
the average for drama pilots. They are generally more expensive than more
conventional pilots but they are often concept driven rather than character
driven. When you look at the testing among this group of shows you often see
high scores for the “idea” of the show but mediocre scores for the characters.
Most other genres are character driven so if you have strong leads you can
overcome a show that has a conventional idea. Weaker testing procedurals will
succeed more often than Sci-Fi/Fantasy because they are more character driven. BONES, for example was an average testing pilot but ran for over ten seasons. Sci-Fi/Fantasy pilots have another flaw, which is that there is often a secret
driving the show and once the secret is revealed the show is over. If the
secret is not revealed fairly quickly to the audience viewers often start to
wonder if the creators even know where the show is heading. “Alcatraz” was a
pilot that we did at FOX and it went to series although no one, including the
creators, had a clue as to why prisoners were returning from the past. So a good
rule for me was that any pilot where the idea scores dominated the character
scores had a better than average chance of failing. I have no idea what the
testing was for “Lost” but I have to believe it scored high with several
characters. Over at FOX “Prison Break” hit the sweet spot of a strong idea with
several strong characters. “Fringe” found that sweet spot until it went off the
tracks.

Execs often get very excited about these Sci-Fi/Fantasy
shows. Marketing execs love them because they generally don’t have to do much
work to sell them. They are noisy. Since they generally test well (even if for
the wrong reasons) program execs generally put them on the schedule in their
minds even before seeing the testing. That happened this season at FOX with MINORITY REPORT but my
favorite example was a pilot called “Them”. It was an aliens among us concept. Melva
Benoit who ran FOX research and reported to me, and I scratched our heads when
we read the script and felt even more certain this was a disaster once we saw
the pilot. Other executives did not share that opinion. They were convinced
that they had a hit on their hands. That year, for whatever reason, the top
execs asked us not to reveal the testing to anyone (including them) until after
all the pilots were screened. The evening before the test results were
going to be made public Melva and I sat down with the two top programming execs
to share the results. “Them” was the lowest testing drama pilot that season and
one of the lowest testing drama pilots ever. That’s saying a lot for a sci-fi
pilot. The next morning, after we shared the research with the larger group, we
were actually accused of fixing the results. That’s how strongly some believed
in this pilot. Fortunately we had video of the focus groups that showed the reaction
of groups to this pilot. It was not pretty. The results of the testing and the
groups were so strong that the pilot did not make the schedule.

Over in comedy one of the biggest drivers of a false
positive has to do with whether the pilot is about “People Together” or “People
Apart”. A simpler way to put it is to determine whether it is a premise comedy pilot
or not. A premise pilot (people apart) generally sets up the idea of the show
and usually ends with the words “wait” “don’t go” “hold on” or some variation
of those words as the star of the show is walking out the door. You often feel
good at the end of a premise pilot but you have no idea what the series is and
often the producers don’t either. “People Together” comedy pilots start with
another day in the life of a group of people (family or friends) who care about
each other. Some event may happen in their lives in the pilot (Rachael running
into the Coffee Shop, Mitch and Cam bringing their adopted child home, Jess
coming to the loft) but there’s no “wait” moment. These people like each other
and care about each other and you do too. Those comedies are far more likely to
result in a false positive. Two of my favorite comedy pilots in the last few
years were “Modern Family” and “Jane the Virgin” both of which have strong,
well-defined relationships at the start of the pilot.

Pilot testing often varies among the networks. When I was at
NBC we would test the pilots on cable systems throughout the country. We would
put the pilot on a channel and then recruit viewers in the market to tune in at
a designated time to watch the pilot. We would then call them after the airing
and they would answer a series of questions. Anyone on the cable system could
wander on to the channel and watch the pilot. We knew we were on to something
with ER (one of the highest testing pilots ever) when cable operators who were
carrying the pilot told us that they were being deluged with calls from
customers who came upon ER and wanted to know when the second episode would run.

When I first came to FOX we would send out cassettes to
subjects who would then be contacted for their input. In recent years we have
been doing mall intercepts throughout the country where the subject would watch
the pilot and then answer questions on a screen. So what does the test tell us?
I‘m sure all the networks do some version of asking the subjects to rank the
show on a scale of Excellent to Poor. They then compare the score for a pilot
with the average score of all previously tested pilots. Next they will ask a
question to try to determine how much of an effort the subject will make to
view another episode of this show. Next the characters are evaluated. There are
generally norms for leads and support characters. High testing pilots are above
the norms in Excellent, Special Effort and Characters (you want to see several
characters pop). Finally a series of diagnostic questions will be asked to
determine network fit, the strength of the idea, level of involvement etc.

We also do theater testing in the Los Angeles area. We try
to recruit equal groups of men/women young/old (18-34-35-49). While they watch
the pilot in a theater they are asked to move a lever up (positive) or down
(negative) to express their feelings about what they are seeing.At any point during the screening the
subject can indicate that they have “tuned out” the show. Research execs and
others watch screens with an overlay of the lines broken out into the four
quadrants.

We would be looking at the age and gender split and we would
be interested in the growth of the lines over the course of the pilot. In a
perfect world you would want to see little difference in the four quadrants and
you are looking for the line to build over the course of the pilot. You can see
points where the pilot drags and how long it takes to get the subjects invested
in what is going on. “New Girl” had the classic line with all four quadrants in
sync and moving upward throughout the episode.

To me, the importance of audience testing was to try to find
the “why” in a show. I was less concerned about what viewers liked about a
specific show but what were the universal elements that can be found in all
successful shows. I would often ask our Research Department (at both NBC and
FOX) to do some testing on successful shows on other networks to see if we can
get at the essence of why the show was working. Over the years I discovered a
couple of recurring themes:

·Ordinary people in extraordinary situations

·Man(or woman) on a mission

·Fish out of water

I’ll leave it up to you to think of successful shows (both
scripted and unscripted) where you find these elements.

For procedurals we have found that the core elements are:

·Two leads with a pinch of sexual tension

·One lead a cop, FBI, CIA whatever

·The other lead has a “super power” used to solve
crimes

·Support group of really smart people.

I just want to be clear that if a procedural has these
characteristics there is no guarantee of success, it just seems to increase the
chances of success. By success of course I mean ratings.

According to Brandon Tartikoff “all hits are flukes”. It’s
hard to argue with that but I have always looked at this business in terms of
reducing failure and investing in success. Testing is one of the ways to do
that. At FOX when we reported on the testing we always presented the data
(after we showed the top line) in terms of what needs to be addressed if this
pilot will be moving to series. The point being if these issues were not
addressed we were probably increasing the chances that the pilot would not
succeed in series.

At NBC Don Ohlmeyer asked Eric Cardinal, our head of
research, and me to look at all of our pilot testing and see if we could come
up with a set of “Research Homilies”. These were truisms that were found in the
successful pilots. If none of these were found in the pilot the chances of
success decreased. Here’s what we delivered to Don:

Against our wishes Don passed these out, as we were about to
screen the pilots one year. It was not well received by the creative executives
who thought we were reducing the pilot process to a cookbook. Someone even
leaked the homilies to TV Guide. All we were trying to say was that successful
pilots share several of these elements while failed pilots are often lacking in
them…that’s all.

This business is going through significant changes and I
think why and how, and even if we test shows, will change with it. I do know we
need audience feedback that goes beyond ratings. It’s always helpful to
understand why something is resonating with an audience. It’s dangerous to
leave that totally in the hands of critics. You need to listen to the consumer.
I have a feeling though that in the next few weeks there will still be a
meeting where the band-aid will be painfully ripped off. There will be good
news and bad news. There will be surprises. The only thing I hope is that
everyone listens.